As the leading spring balance manufacturer in Australia, Doric has been producing spring balance systems to suit both aluminium and timber windows for over 20 years.

Designed and manufactured completely in-house at Doric, the spring balance is the most popular OEM balance system in the country with over 500,000 units manufactured every year.

Part of the spring balance manufacturing process involved Doric’s assembly workers manually pulling on the spring within the product to clip on the retainer.

This was an extremely repetitive and awkward movement and the workers were pulling on springs that were designed to support windows weighing up to 25 kgs. Each worker pulled over 500 springs every day and this typically resulted in sore fingers, arms, shoulders, as well as risk of repetitive strain injuries.

This opportunity was identified by Ching who brought it to the attention of Rachel Alchin. A project was then created to develop a new product that would address the issue, improve WHS and productivity, as well as provide easy operation and assembly on-site for customers.

The project was driven by the team in the springs balances area, and for the next 18 months a brain storming session was underway to work out how this process could be improved. Enlisting the help of everyone, engineers, designers, tool makers, supervisors, the health and safety team and 18 months later the Spring’tainer was invented.

This invention was then put forward for the Endeavour awards, which are the annual manufacturing event that was held in Sydney on the 12th of May. The Spring ’tainer’ journey of Doric was put forward as ‘Safety Solution of the Year’ and became a finalist for the award.

A small team attended the awards dinner last night and after the four finalists were announced, Doric was the winner!

It is an extremely proud moment for the team, for the entire group and is a real example of our key values. Empowerment, Acknowledgement, Engagement and Encouragement, please join all of us in celebrating this success. It is a fantastic prize and a real example of what great team work can achieve. Congratulations!